With the extensive application of computers and the increasing spread of networks, threats from the interior and exterior of networks are increasing. In order to protect security of a system, threat detection needs to be performed on a network. Protocol content detection is one kind of threat detection.
Taking an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) device as an example, existing protocol content detection is mainly performed by using mode matching, that is, corresponding to different protocols, different detection rules are configured. A function of customizing a rule is provided in an IPS device, and detection is performed by adding, enabling, or closing some detection rules by a user itself. However, thousands of existing protocol types exists, and tens of thousands of specific protocol categories of the protocol types exist. Extensive experience is required for accurately configuring a detection rule, and it needs to take a lot of time. At present, most users perform detection in a manner of directly enabling all protocol detection rules. In IPS threat detection, most performance of the IPS threat detection is consumed in a protocol content detection part; therefore, in an existing manner of directly enabling all the protocol detection rules, a protocol threat that does not occur in a network is also detected, leading to consumption of many unnecessary resources by IPS, and lowering the efficiency and performance of IPS detection.